Joplin hospital staff took action during disaster
If you haven’t already, take 90 seconds to read Tulsa World reporter Michael Overall’s brief, powerful account of how emergency preparedness translated to emergency action at the hospital caught in the center of the May tornado in Joplin, Mo.
Photo by Red Cross: Carl Manning GKCARC via Flickr
The staff had practiced severe weather drills and evacuations hundreds of times but, as one administrator told Oklahoma colleagues, “There’s no way you can plan for an F-5 tornado.” Nevertheless, Overall writes, the well-drilled staff of St. John’s hospital “evacuated all 183 patients in just 90 minutes with no major injuries,” a sentence you won’t appreciate until you read Overall’s narrative based on a hospital administrator’s talk at a conference for regional emergency workers.
For those of you looking for story ideas, you might look into local hospitals’ disaster plans. Have they really planned for every contingency? Certainly there are things no one can plan for, but it’s worth reading the story from this hospital and evaluating disaster plans with those events in mind.
For more, read AHCJ’s roundup and review of Joplin tornado coverage.
Is U.S. ready for Haiti-style mass casualty event?
Filed under: Government, Hospitals, Hot Health Headline
The GAO’s latest release, “State Efforts to Plan for Medical Surge Could Benefit from Shared Guidance for Allocating Scarce Medical Resources (20-page PDF),” is the result of an evaluation of the nation’s medical capacity to deal with “mass casualty events,” a response they refer to as a “medical surge.” Read the one-page summary here. The release is a summary of a similarly titled 2008 report, but it has gained extra relevance in the light of the U.S. response to the similar circumstances of the 2010 Haiti earthquake.
The report found that states were making good progress in developing bed reporting systems and coordinating with military and veterans hospitals, as well as in selecting alternate care sites and registering medical volunteers. It also noticed that they were lagging when it came to planning for altered standards of care.
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AHCJ presentation: How prepared is your city for a health disaster? (Audio)
Protecting the Public’s Health from Disease, Disasters, and Bioterrorism
S.C.: Pandemic plan handled H1N1, needs tweaking
Joey Holleman at The State reviewed South Carolina’s reaction to H1N1 and what it revealed about the state’s pandemic preparedness. Holleman found that, on the whole, state officials and health professionals felt their pandemic preparations, put in place after scares such as SARS and H5N1, had worked well and proposed only minor adjustments to the overall plan.
AHCJ resources for covering flu, pandemics and preparednessHolleman said those specifics include detailing school closing plans, assigning responsibility for home-quarantined patients and adjusting hospital entry traffic to keep flu sufferers isolated. Apart from those details, the state’s plans appear to be working.
So far, the state has had 36 CDC-confirmed cases of H1N1 and no reported deaths. The cornerstones of S.C.’s response have been rapid stockpiling of necessary medications and materials and rapid education of both hospital staffs and the public. For the most part, officials said, the effort was not much different than previous efforts to contain other infectious diseases like chicken pox or whooping cough.
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